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Robert Rodgers Korstad, Dreaming of a Time: The School of Public Health, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1939-1989 (1990).Open the sourceAll sources
Searched the full chronology of 9,006 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–32.Back to highlights
- Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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The State Board of Health proposes a course for health officers and public health nurses at the university
After the 1918 influenza epidemic and the poor condition of army recruits, the legislature paid for a campus health officer, and Dr. William deB. MacNider won over Dr. Benjamin E. Washburn of the State Board of Health to a joint training plan. The board's tentative report offered the university a postgraduate course for health officers and public health nurses; President Harry W. Chase welcomed it, but the plan stalled for lack of money and faculty support.
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State health officer James M. Parrott plans a Chapel Hill training school that would also serve as Orange County's health department
Working with university officials, the State Board of Health drew up a plan for a training school for county health workers at Chapel Hill. Because Orange County had no full-time health officer, the school's director would fill that post and the county nurse, sanitary officer and health secretary would teach, but the Rockefeller Foundation could find no money for it.
People: Herman G. Baity · Frank Porter Graham
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The Medical School, the School of Engineering and the State Board of Health give two twelve-week public health courses
Prodded by M. V. Ziegler of the Public Health Service, the three bodies offered two twelve-week short courses in the 1934-35 school year. Eleven students divided their time between classes and practical work at State Board of Health offices in Raleigh and at county health departments. A first short course in public health administration, set for the fall of 1933, had drawn three registrants and been canceled.
People: Charles Staples Mangum
Subject: UNC School of Medicine
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Herman G. Baity brings sanitary engineering into the Division of Public Health
After the trustees moved the School of Engineering from Chapel Hill to State College in Raleigh, Baity, who had opposed the move, joined the Division of Public Health as professor of sanitary engineering. He brought the sanitary engineering program with him and kept his assistants, his laboratory and the right to grant advanced degrees.
People: Frank Porter Graham
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UNC's new Division of Public Health admits its first students
Under a December 13, 1935 agreement among the university, the State Board of Health and the Public Health Service, the Medical School opened a Division of Public Health under Dr. Milton J. Rosenau as the training center for an eight-state sanitary district. Four health officer trainees enrolled for the winter quarter, fifty-one health workers had registered by March 28, and forty-six enrolled when classes began in the fall. Rosenau first had his office in Caldwell Hall.
People: M. J. (Milton Joseph) Rosenau · Charles Staples Mangum
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The Graduate School lets the Division of Public Health grant degrees
Rosenau asked that the division be allowed to confer bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees as well as certificates. The Graduate School agreed, and the university treated the approval as the first step toward an independent School of Public Health.
People: M. J. (Milton Joseph) Rosenau
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The Division of Public Health admits its first graduate students
In the 1939-40 year the division moved into the new Medical and Public Health Building, later MacNider Hall, gave its last short course that fall, and admitted fourteen graduate students under a redesigned curriculum. Emil Chanlett entered the master's program in sanitary engineering that year.
People: M. J. (Milton Joseph) Rosenau
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Margery Lord becomes the first woman student in public health at Chapel Hill
Dr. Margery Lord enrolled in 1940 as the first woman student in public health at Chapel Hill. With Ruth Hay, Margaret Blee and Lucy Morgan on the faculty, and Eunice Tyler from 1945, the school soon had more women teaching than was usual anywhere else on the campus.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Rosenau recruits Ruth Hay from Berkeley to head a new Department of Public Health Nursing
Venereal disease control work had raised the demand for public health nurses, and in 1940 State Health Officer Carl Reynolds asked the school for a nursing course; the Public Health Service and the Children's Bureau backed its plan. Rosenau offered the headship to Ruth Hay of the University of California, and she recommended her Berkeley colleague Margaret Blee as the department's second teacher.
People: M. J. (Milton Joseph) Rosenau
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Lucy Morgan starts the health education program at the School of Public Health
Three young women on State Board of Health fellowships enrolled in health education at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1942, and Rosenau asked for Dr. Lucy S. Morgan, a Public Health Service educator then working in Fayetteville, to build the curriculum. With twenty W. K. Kellogg Foundation scholarships, the first class of public health educators numbered twenty-five in the spring of 1943.
People: M. J. (Milton Joseph) Rosenau
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
- Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Black and white health education students from North Carolina College and UNC train together
From 1945 UNC faculty taught a public health education program for Black students at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. Lucy Morgan brought the two groups together in a journal club that met in Durham and Chapel Hill, sent them to field work together and held joint open houses, at times drawing the window shades in Chapel Hill; a 1946 photograph shows both groups at the Orange-Person-Chatham district's field training center.
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The Public Health Service moves its Syphilis Experimental Laboratory to the School of Public Health
After the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation dropped its venereal disease research money and Johns Hopkins closed its Laboratory of Experimental Therapeutics, the Public Health Service made Chapel Hill the main research laboratory of its Venereal Disease Division. The university agreed to put up a building for it, a second closed federal laboratory sent more staff and equipment in 1949, and Dr. Harold Magnuson's Department of Experimental Medicine grew out of the work.
People: Edward G. McGavran
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The school opens a Department of Public Health Nutrition under A. Hughes Bryan
Rosenau had planned the department before his death, calling nutrition the South's leading public health problem, and the General Education Board paid for it. Dr. A. Hughes Bryan set up its laboratory in Building C, a temporary structure on the north side of MacNider Hall, and the department enrolled its first M.P.H. students in 1950.
People: M. J. (Milton Joseph) Rosenau
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Dean McGavran reports the school spread across the old Water Works building and four temporary buildings
Asking Chancellor Robert B. House to put a new public health building first among the university's needs, McGavran wrote that one department sat in the old Water Works building halfway across campus and that four temporary buildings beside MacNider Hall were overfull. The Department of Health Education still kept its office in the Water Works building in the 1950s, and the school waited until 1961 to break ground for its own building.
People: R. B. House
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Bernard G. Greenberg heads a new Department of Biostatistics
The school had looked for a biostatistics head since 1945 and in 1949 organized the department with Greenberg as its chairman. He had first taken a course at the school in 1946 while a graduate student in experimental statistics at North Carolina State College. The department's first joint study, with the nutrition department, compared schoolchildren's body measurements with their diets.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The school founds a Department of Maternal and Child Health
Paid for by the U.S. Children's Bureau, the department was headed by Dr. Sidney S. Chipman, with Jean Rebentisch joining in 1950 and medical social worker Geraldine Gourley in 1953. Its team of a physician, a nurse and a social worker taught both specialists and the school's other students.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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A Public Health Service grant creates a Department of Mental Health under Roger Howell
Until 1952 the school's mental health teaching had been a few guest lectures. Dr. Roger Howell, the department's only member, also served as acting head of the State Board of Health's mental health section and began a curriculum for administrators of mental health centers.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Margaret Dolan succeeds Ruth Hay as head of Public Health Nursing
Dolan, from a North Carolina family with long ties to the university, had taken her B.S. in public health nursing at the school in 1944 and joined its faculty in 1950. She took charge of the department in 1959 and later served as president of the American Nurses Association and the American Public Health Association.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The School of Public Health admits its first Black students
For fifteen years the school had trained Black health educators through a separate program at North Carolina College in Durham. In 1960, with the civil rights movement pressing against segregation, those programs ended and Black students enrolled at Chapel Hill, at first in small numbers.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Ground is broken for the School of Public Health's own building
State voters approved a bond issue on October 27, 1959 that included $1 million for the building, after the North Carolina Public Health Association urged its 1,200 members to back it, and the Public Health Service added $700,000 in matching funds. Ground was broken early in 1961: Korstad gives January 16 in his text and February 6 in a photo caption, and a Daily Tar Heel photo of February 19 shows Chancellor William B. Aycock turning the first shovel with Dean McGavran beside him.
People: Edward G. McGavran
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Sanitary Engineering is renamed the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering
In the late 1950s Daniel Okun used Public Health Service money to widen the department into air hygiene, industrial hygiene and sanitary chemistry. In 1962 it took its new name and grouped its courses into five program areas, from water resources to radiological hygiene.
People: Daniel A. Okun
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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W. Fred Mayes becomes dean of the School of Public Health
Chosen by a search committee chaired by John Wright with McGavran's backing, Mayes came from the Public Health Service's Division of Research Grants. Under him federal grants drove fast growth and the school's focus moved from community service toward research; he stepped down at the end of the 1971-72 year.
People: Edward G. McGavran
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Governor Terry Sanford dedicates the new School of Public Health building
A two-day program opened on Saturday with an address by Abel Wolman of Johns Hopkins, group sessions on public health past and future, and an evening speech by Frank Porter Graham. On Sunday morning John Wright planted a southern magnolia in memory of Milton J. Rosenau, and Sanford dedicated the building that afternoon as the retiring McGavran prepared to leave for India.
People: Frank Porter Graham · Edward G. McGavran
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Biostatistics overflows from Rosenau Hall into the Drane Cottage and Drane House on Pittsboro Street
A growth spurt in 1965 filled the rooms the Department of Biostatistics had been given in Rosenau Hall, and it moved faculty and staff into temporary space in the Drane Cottage and Drane House behind the school on Pittsboro Street.
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The School of Public Health building is officially named Rosenau Hall
The building dedicated in April 1963 was not formally named for Milton J. Rosenau, the school's founding director, until 1965.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The Carolina Population Center is set up with Moye Freymann as director
Discussed in the School of Public Health from 1964 as a way to coordinate population research and teaching and to advise health agencies at home and abroad, the center was set up in 1966. Ford Foundation money tilted its early work toward developing countries, while in North Carolina it helped local agencies build a family planning program.
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Black public health students issue a statement of concerns to the school
Frustrated by the slow pace of integration, Black students asked the school for more Black students and faculty, courses for those planning to work in Black communities, a minority recruitment officer and a larger Black part in projects about Black communities. Dean Mayes named a committee, which recommended hiring a full-time minority recruiter.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The School of Public Health hires William Small as its first full-time minority recruiter
Small, a Wilmington native and North Carolina College chemistry graduate who had earned his M.S.P.H. at the school in 1969, left a State Board of Health chemist's job to take the post. Minority enrollment rose from twenty to forty-nine by the fall of 1972, and the school then turned to recruiting Black faculty.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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The Lipid Research Clinics coordinating center opens in the NCNB building in downtown Chapel Hill
A National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute grant set up the program's Central Patient Registry and Coordinating Center at the School of Public Health. From offices in the NCNB building downtown it set testing standards and analyzed blood fat data from clinics in the United States, Canada, Israel and the Soviet Union, and Soviet scientists later came to Chapel Hill to work on it.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Bernard G. Greenberg becomes dean of the School of Public Health
The faculty's clear choice after Mayes stepped down, Greenberg set out to repair the school's ties with state and local health agencies and revived the Alumni Association and the newsletter The Body Politic. He pressed for a new building throughout his deanship but retired in 1982 before it was funded.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
- Recent decades · 1976–2026
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Students start the School of Public Health's minority health conference
Begun in 1977 and planned and run by students, the conference aimed to build pride and organizing skills among the minority students the school expected to become health leaders, in the words of recruiter William Small.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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Ronald Oxendine is named the school's director of American Indian Recruitment Services
Because its efforts to recruit Native American students had done even less well than its recruitment of Black students, the School of Public Health hired Oxendine, a Lumbee from Maxton, to lead American Indian recruitment.
Subject: UNC School of Public Health
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